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Nebula6.2, June 2009
Schaberg: Bird Citing… 102
Bird Citing: On the Aesthetics and Techno-Poetics of Flight.
By Christopher Schaberg
The first flash of a bird incites the desire to duplicate not by translating the
glimpsed image into a drawing or a poem or a photograph but simply by
continuing to see her five seconds, twenty-five seconds, forty-five seconds
later—as long as the bird is there to be beheld.
—Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just
In The Open, Giorgio Agamben illustrates how humanity and animality are bound
together in an irreducible conceptual pairing. Throughout his aphoristic chapters,
Agamben lingers on historical images of figures such as the humanoid acephalous that
either remains headless or receives the cranium of a beast; such images illuminate
caesurae between the elevated human and the lowly animal. It is this visible yet
indeterminate space between subjects that Agamben probes:
…man has always been thought of as the articulation and conjunction of a
body and a soul, or a living thing and a logos, of a natural (or animal)
element and a supernatural or social or divine element. We must learn
instead to think of man as what results from the incongruity of these two
elements, and investigate not the metaphysical mystery of conjunction, but
rather the practical and political mystery of separation.1
In this article I would like to build on and contemporize Agamben’s investigation of
man/animal incongruities and the conceptual space necessitated therein. Here, I would
like to suggest that we might also learn to investigate the practical and political mysteries
of commonplace figurations that reveal how humans struggle to attain a certain
animality. To this end, the following pages explore an aesthetic and poetic trend around
human air travel that I call bird citing.
A first order bird citing appears as simple as the citation of a bird in an aesthetic
object such as a poem, such as in Wallace Stevens’s widely anthologized Modernist
paragon, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” The first paragraph stanza reads:
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.2
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In these lines the blackbird is cited as a poetic object worth visualizing. Yet as the reader
catches sight of the blackbird, the blackbird’s own ocular perception is cited, and object
becomes subject. In these lines, bird citing becomes a double bird sighting—the view
zooms from panoramic to the point of a blackbird’s eye, from distant topography, to
intimate anatomy:
3
4
Over the following pages, my aim is to outline a network of allusive avian vectors and
spectacles that intersect along lines of flight. Such lines of flight can be imaginative and
imagistic, as in Stevens’s poem; they can be straight forwardly symbolic, as in the bird
insignias that appear on the tails of many commercial jets; or, bird citing can be starkly
literal, as in errant birds flitting in and out of sliding doors at the baggage claim. In other
words, I am particularly curious about how bird citing appears where many lines of flight
converge: at airports. I want to suggest that there are curious overlaps in the multiple
significations of bird forms that collide and collude in this networked space.
I will begin by examining airports as human sites that emanate a skein of
animality via bird citing, and I argue that the technologies of human air travel rely on an
animal imaginary that draws the human subject into play of wild and cultivated
significations. For instance, In 1920, American journalist William G. Shepherd evoked
bird citing as a way to describe the influx of air travel:
The Audubon Society knows every domestic whim o[f] every desirable
American bird, and no farm home is complete without its neat little home
for birds. What we need today is an Audubon Society of American cities
and towns for the cultivation of the welfare of our linen-winged,
aluminum-lunged, unfeathered friends.5
This passage reflects how ornithology and air travel have been historically linked: to
promote airports is, in a way, to promote something related to the aesthetically oriented
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collecting mentality of the bird watcher. Yet via this analogy, Shepherd also implies how
air travel disseminated across the nation—artificially, by a ‘society’ that might cultivate
airports, as well as organically, as it were, through biological dispersion of ‘winged’ and
‘lunged’ aircraft. In other words, the call to birdlife is both a grasp at a natural order of
things, as well as an enculturation of new technologies. Airport historian Martin Greif
cites this case as unique: “Never before nor since, one imagines, has the airport been
likened to a bird house.”6 In fact, however, this ornithological impulse has haunted the
histories of air travel, and along the way, airports hardly escape comparison to
birdhouses. Avian spectrality is a common airport strategy, and seemingly simple bird
citing is often in the service of obverse aesthetics of aerospace technologies.
Airports involve many forms of bird citing. Around these sites, avian
appearances can become layered, unpeeling where the real and the symbolic overlap.
Readymade montages of bird sightings abound; for instance, in one recent photograph
that I snapped at Sacramento airport, a common starling balanced on barbed wire, and in
the background, the tail of an American Airlines jet flashes a bird icon between two
capital As:
7
To rephrase Wallace Stevens, among twenty jet planes, everything moving is a bird.
To add another dimension to this multiplying figure of figuration, historically
airports have been designed to resemble or allude to birds. Thus airports are also places
for bird siting, through which location itself can be shaped like a bird. Consider Eero
Saarinen’s 1962 TWA Terminal in New York. Airport historian Alastair Gordon
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describes this piece of modernist architecture in reference to its bird form: “The larger
sections were like the wings of a bird that stretched laterally in daring cantilevers to the
north and south.” The TWA Terminal exaggerates the scale of birdlife for effect:
8
Similarly, Berlin’s 1941 neoclassical Tempelhof Aerodrome was created to look like a
mighty eagle in flight. A Google Earth view shows the outward/upward curving
concourses, which would be the wings of the bird. One can compare an aerial view of
Tempelhof with the eagle icon in the Homeland Security logo to get a sense of the bird
shape cited (the eagle’s head at Tempelhof, which is not exactly perceptible in this
schema, would be located on the white tarmac).
9
In the case of Tempelhof, this bird citing challenges notions of scale and point of view:
an airport on the ground is supposed to look like it is a flying creature—but we can only
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see this from an already elevated aerial view. Airport bird citing through architecture
tends to warp scale by magnifying birdlife, thus diminishing the human subject.
Bird forms become more confusing when airplanes—the obvious corresponding
object of flight—are drawn into the semiotic mix. Take, for instance, the art installation
“Rara Avis” (2001) by Ralph Helmick, at Chicago’s Midway airport:
10
This diaphanous sculpture of a cardinal is suspended above a bank of escalators in the
main terminal; a bird form is achieved by the careful arrangement of 2000 tiny metal
airplanes. Miniature airplanes actually comprise this huge bird; the monstrous animal is
made of toy machines—the airport itself is turned into a surrealist display case of sorts.
The human viewer is both larger than the airplanes, and smaller than the great bird—a
vertiginous subject position, indeed:
11
Internally, this sculpture twists scale one more time: contemporary airliners are made to
appear the same size as antique bi-planes, WWII fighter planes, and helicopters from the
1960s:
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12
As I have already hinted, perhaps one of the most banal acts of bird citing appears
in the crest of the Department of Homeland Security, in the ubiquitous form of patriotic
eagle.
13
This bird citing is absorbed into the unconscious, all-encompassing sign system of the
airport, yet given its historical fascistic register, we might pause to put additional pressure
on this icon. This particular crest was located on a flat screen hanging from the ceiling in
the Sacramento airport as one approached the security checkpoint to Terminal A. The
Homeland Security sign ‘welcomes’ me—but into what space or concept? Am I being
welcomed into the airport? If so, it is too late—I have already entered and am about to be
subjected to the absurd regime of post-9/11 security procedures, including removing my
shoes and shuffling through a surveilled magnometer. Furthermore, the bird citing on the
Homeland Security crest undoes the inside/outside dichotomy so crucial to the
sterile/non-sterile designations of airport security: these must be clear and distinct
categories, and yet suggesting birdlife on the inside of the airport makes the site an
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aviary, at best, and a veritable wilderness, at worst. Might the sign, then, be welcoming
me to the country? Again, too late—I’m here, and furthermore, I might be departing the
country through this air-port. Perhaps I am simply being welcomed to this security stage,
this identity checkpoint. If so, I would like to argue that bird citing works in the favor of
this spatial initiation: bird citing posits a natural order in the guise of national security.
The eagle on the Homeland Security crest asserts dominance and watchfulness, harnesses
power and boundless knowledge. The eagle watches over the airport. The eagle is the
airport.
One can begin to see how birds are cited around airports as common yet strange
figures that disorient the human in flight as well as the human in viewing flight. In these
airport cases, I am articulating the ways in which birds are cited——observed, called
upon, and indicted—and how they are sighted visually: birds are seen, represented in
order to be recognized, symbolically appropriated, and used to re-mark acts of flight and
acts of visualizing flight. Then, birds are also sited as locational, architectural, sculptural,
and topographical registers. These tracts demonstrate the scope of bird citing: how
airports confusingly reference avian imagery and ornithological visuality, creating an
interpenetrating system of signification.
I now turn to several specific cases of bird citing that evince a Northern California
ecosystem of localism, militarism, and the ornithology of air travel.
On California’s Interstate 5 nearing the Sacramento Airport, one will often see
flocks of migrating birds in enormous V patterns undulating in the skyline beneath 737s
on final approach. According to an article about “bird strikes” at the Sacramento airport,
“Rice fields, the Sacramento River and the Yolo bypass create a paradise for waterfowl
and wading birds, like herons. And above it all is the Pacific Flyway, a major migratory
route for birds.”14
On the ground, the airport’s elaborate network of runways and
taxiways interrupts and sprawls across this “paradise.” Because of its location,
Sacramento airport has one of the nation’s highest numbers of “bird strikes,” or when a
plane upon takeoff or landing hits a bird—a potentially disastrous clash.
As if to reflect on this dangerous proposition, several huge birds come into view
as one exits Interstate 5 and approaches Terminal A:
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15
Dennis Oppenheim’s art installation “Flying Gardens” (2004) consists of twelve
exoskeletal, car-size bird sculptures scattered around Terminal A—many of them are
hanging off of the parking structure, actually appearing to fly out of the building:
16
These sculptures are a postmodern pastiche of the phoenix myth: colorful, futuristically
articulated birds fly out of the uniform wreckage of a parking garage—sunset glow and
the interior lighting can make the structure appear to be a smoldering ruin.
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17
The birds appear triumphant and sleek against the monochromatic stack of the parking
structure. Originally the birds were designed to include foliage growing all over them,
replete with climbing vines, as if to project an overgrown, post-apocalyptic aura.
However, the airport authority forestalled this plan: as living gardens, these icons of
wildness might have become a little too wild, allowing real birds to nest in the art, and
thus incurring unnecessary labor costs of cleaning up bird poop.
18
Without any actual flora on the birds, the name of this installation is a non sequitur: there
is nothing garden-like nor organic about these creatures aside from their avian shapes.
Interestingly, there are plants growing beneath the sculptures, but to extend figurative
logic to the sculptures we would have to imagine the birds themselves as growing out of
the parking garage, their solid iron gray anchors serving as roots or shoots. In this
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schema, the birds become blooms, and the parking structure something of a potted plant.
Or, the airport becomes a strange biology lab bloated in scale, in which hybrid bird plants
are grown. What is interesting is that the construction materials and sutures of these
sculptures are left exposed, as if ironically to demystify any organicized ideals about
commercial air travel. In other words, while the homage to birds celebrates human
aviation as if it is natural, the self-referring madeness of these sculptures undermines the
very comparison implicit in the shape. Birds can fly, and human beings can fly airplanes;
but a prefabricated bird the size of a minivan and tethered to a parking garage pushes the
avian metaphor into a realm of absurdity.
Looking out at these birds from the inside of the parking structure, one might
wonder: if these birds are flying out of the garage, are they then flying into the airport, in
the notorious style of 9/11? Two camera-phone shots would suggest so:
19
This perverse view exposes comparable angles of banking that denote abrupt, tactical
piloting. Oppenheim’s birds are not aimed skyward, but rather are headed into the built
space of commerce and privileged mobility. In other words, to put it plainly, “Flying
Gardens” is eerily reminiscent of Boeing 767s banking into the World Trade Center;
these hijacked birds mimic terrifying maneuvers. The installation thus reveals a double
geographic imperative: the object of flight serves both as a harmless reminder of the
airport’s ecosystem (a bird migration zone), and also conjures other forms of anxious
banking in New York City (World Trade/Global Terrorism). Designed as a pleasant
distraction for passengers, these avian aesthetics in fact riff on repressed anxieties of
flight and predation that leak out of a globalized unconscious.
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As if to underscore this coupling, the article about bird strikes at the Sacramento
airport puns its title as “Clear-cut for takeoff: Citing wildlife and terrorists, the airport
wants to destroy more native oaks.” The article goes on to explain that both migrating
birds and calculating terrorists can use the cover of trees in ways that threaten to disrupt
airport traffic. “Clear-cut for takeoff” highlights very real tensions that exist between
airports and birds; indeed, the article frankly claims, “‘Birds and aircraft don’t mix.’”20
Yet whether through art or ecology, mixtures of aircraft and birds are widespread around
the Sacramento airport.
At this point I want to return to our original sense of bird citing: the simple
noticing or mentioning of a bird. As in Wallace Stevens’s perspectival poem “Thirteen
Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” bird citing often turns on visual disorientation. To
further illustrate the problem of disoriented visuality, I turn to Gary Snyder’s 2004 poem
“No Shadow,” which records the ornithological impulse in terms of foreground and
background views. The speaker of the poem is looking out over the Sacramento River
Valley; this panoramic landscape view initiates a bird citing that ricochets off a
technosphere of military aviation.
The poem begins as a prose tour of the Yuba Goldfieds. The first paragraph
focalizes a scene, “at the lower Yuba River outflow where it enters the Sacramento valley
flatlands, a mile-wide stretch between grass and blue oak meadows. It goes on for ten
miles.”21
The second paragraph describes “a female osprey hunting along the main river
channel. Her flight shot up, down, all sides, suddenly fell feet first into the river and
emerged with a fish. Maybe fooling the fish by zigzagging, so—no hawk shadow.”22
The poem proper commences shortly after this ornithological citation: two prose
paragraphs give way to streamlined poetry as a new object of perception comes into
view:
Standing on a gravel hill by the lower Yuba
can see down west a giant airforce cargo plane from Beale
hang-gliding down to land
strangely slow over the tumbled dredged-out goldfields
—practice run
shadow of a cargo jet—soon gone
no-shadow of an osprey
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still here 23
This poem draws uneasy parallels between a mammoth Air Force cargo plane and an
osprey. They both fly in the river valley, and at first glance they seem to beg comparison.
Snyder, however, contrasts the “no-shadow” fishing technique of the osprey with the
“strangely slow” vector of the aircraft “hang-gliding down to land”—in the end, the
osprey is “still here.” The jet, on the other hand, will be “soon gone”—both in the
immediate context and also, to take a deep ecological view, in the longer future of the
planet in geologic time. In this schema, the osprey is a metonymy for animality in
general, while the cargo plane seems to stand for a repressive state apparatus at large.
Upon closer inspection, however, he division is not a reductive binary opposition of
aggressive human and passive animal. The bird is not simply cited as more naturally
aesthetic; nor is the air force cargo plane purely militarized. Remember, the poem
contrasts the Air Force cargo plane, in all its silence (because “hang-gliding”) and
spacious (even potentially humanitarian) capacity, with the stealthy tact of an actually
hunting osprey. The osprey is paramilitary; the Air Force cargo plane is, in this instance,
a benign object of perception—it is on a “practice run,” after all. What might seem to be
a politicized critique of certain modes of flight breaks down, not in the least because the
poem’s ornithological impulse conjures specters of empiricism and surveillance. It is this
point of view that allows these two phenomena to exchange foreground and background
throughout the poem; in other words, only from an already elevated vantage point can the
viewer notice that these incommensurate lines of flight serendipitously share scale.
If we take Snyder’s elevated vantage point to the extreme, these lines lead to
another nearby bird citing.
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24
Google Earth’s “satellite view” of Beale Air Force Base captures the background
topography of Snyder’s poem, and a “Blackbird” punctures the tarmac. Beale was the
home base of the Lockheed SR-71 “Blackbird”—a supersonic, high-altitude spy plane
developed secretly in the early 1960s and used for reconnaissance missions over North
Vietnam. This is the black figure in the diamond-shaped, white center of the Google
Earth image. The unofficial appellation off to the side, “Blackbird,” cites a link between
avian classification and militarized air/force.
The Google Earth image, however, offers a disorienting satellite view of the spy
plane. Aerial perception has been inverted and rendered horizontal: one stares at a
computer screen in order to view the ground from high above. One essentially swaps
subject positions with the Blackbird, so that the personal computer user now spies on the
grounded spy plane. Yet this leads to a query inspired by Snyder’s “No Shadow”: we
might speculate and wonder, is the plane in the satellite image really a plane, or could it
rather be the shadow of the very plane from which we are spying? If we are viewing this
base from the imaging technologies of a satellite (which could as easily be equipped on a
spy plane), we could almost be seeing our own shadow on the ground. In one stock
photo from a Google image search, we can see the Blackbird from a meta-aerial
perspective, in which Beale Air Force Base lies somewhere near the edge of the frame,
below the foothills:
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25
To reformulate Wallace Stevens yet again: among twenty snowy mountains / the only
moving thing / was a blackbird / taking pictures / of itself.
Furthermore, Google Earth displays a visual surface that becomes a palimpsest for
the textuality of the “Blackbird.” As Snyder’s “No Shadow” cites the visual overlap of
the osprey and the cargo plane, Google Earth registers a corollary overlay at Beale Air
Force Base. Each text cites collusions between militarized flight and ornithological
reference–perception: Snyder’s poem sights a bird, and then sees how an Air Force plane
does not act like a bird; Google Earth overlays the word “Blackbird” on the topographical
visual field of a military air base.
Through bird citing, these two texts also deploy distinct environmental
aesthetics. Snyder’s lines on the page mimic the logic of a riparian ecology, at times
mimicking the “springtime rush” of prose paragraphs, and elsewhere streaming like the
“main river channel”—flowing enjambment creating bends, and short, widely spaced
lines undulating like rapids:
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26
Beale Air Force Base, on the other hand, places the SR-71 Blackbird on display in the
middle of a grassy lawn right next to the tarmac, suggesting connections between
militarized pavement and verdant domesticity:
27
The topos of the military airfield is multiply superimposed: first with a neat grass lawn;
then with a not-so-secret spy plane; and finally with the word “Blackbird.” What
emerges is a chiasmic imbrication of avian and techno-cultural forms: No mapping
without the airbase; no airbase without grass; no grass without spy planes; no spy planes
without birds; no birds without open space; no open space without mapping. Google
Earth’s scopic economy of Beale Air Force Base implicates a looped chain of referents
with no stable ground. As if self-reflexive about this blackbird citing, look what
happened when I searched for blackbird images on Google:
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28
Which came first, the blackbird or the bomb? Which has priority, a military spy plane, or
a common blackbird? Contra Wallace Stevens, a Google Image search suggests that
there are “about 1,020,000” ways to look at a blackbird, and this includes everything
from military spy planes to a T-shirt that metaphorically depicts a person with a migraine
headache who is unzipping his skull in order to let out a flock of blackbirds.
I wish to end, if inconclusively, with the image from a magazine advertisement
for Hawaiian Airlines from 2003:
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29
In this image, an airliner is cleverly folded into a grid of native Hawaiian bird species.
The Hawaiian Airlines Boeing 767-300ER is juxtaposed with snapshots of resident bird
species; the wide-body jet is figured into native framework by way of catalogued birdlife.
The reader becomes a naturalist, however, only to come across an object that is
indisputably out of scale and out of place: while these practically weightless birds rest on
tree branches, the 400,000-pound jet full of human beings is not at its arrivals gate, but is
flying. From this basis of scalar inversion, the birds must either be monstrous, or else the
airliner has undergone incredible miniaturization. Either way, the scale is inescapably
off, and as I have tried to show, this is a common trope of bird citing. We cannot find our
bearings in this ad; to take one subject position is to be caught in the absurdity of another
corollary subject position. Meanwhile, flight has been cited as a naturalizing linkage
between indigenous ecologies and commercial airlines.
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We then must grapple with the splintered point of view assumed by the Hawaiian
Airlines ad. The birds suggest that we are on their level: observing them from a tree,
perhaps, or from on the ground. Yet the 767 lies at a great distance beneath the viewer—
and it is also captured in flight, cruising, most likely, at upwards of 30,000 feet. So we
have assumed an impossible bird’s eye view of a jet in flight: we are positioned far above
the plane, spying from an oxygen-depleted altitude. It would almost seem that we have
found ourselves looking down from a high altitude bomber—back in the cockpit of the
SR-71, as it were. We have swung from the naturalist comportment of collecting and
cataloguing, to a vantage point of military aerial perception. The ad in fact suggests that
subject positions in flight are dangerously indiscriminate, and endlessly overlapping.
Furthermore, the birds all appear as collectives in groups of two or three,
presumably as female/male identifiers, with an occasional juvenile sharing the branch.
On the other hand, the aircraft is singular, seen alone. One might extend collectivity to
the interior of the plane, and envision happy families eating Hawaiian Airlines breakfasts
on the way to their vacations, but then the lonely subject position of the viewer is
revealed: ‘we’ are outside of and alienated from the imaginary groups of human beings.
Thus, the ad holds naturally occurring collectives (even at the level of the mind’s eye)
against an isolated culture machine.
The Hawaiian native species are presented on template of empirical knowledge
(they suggest ornithology at work), or as collectible pleasure objects—the Audubon book
as luxury item to be viewed leisurely in the comfort of an armchair. Both of these
presentations are complicated by internal disparities of power. The jet trumps the birds,
but is also surrounded and contained by their comfort and pleasure-inducing qualities.
This can be seen as well in the copperplate typeface under each ‘bird’ image: this script
historically displaces the currency of the ad, transporting us, as it were, not westward
across the Pacific Ocean in the 21st-century, but rather eastward, back toward styles of
19th
-century textual production and consumption. This ad dabbles in diagrammatic
constructs for empirical knowledge production as well as for armchair enjoyment: the
birds are gridlocked in matrices of capital and global expansion.
Google’s image search and Hawaiian Airline’s ad campaign are driving at a
similarly associative end: the visual equation of birds and planes is achieved by attaining
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the view of the surveilling, Googling outsider. Google, in other words, evokes something
of a ‘window-seat’ or ‘airport reading’ comportment, where fields of knowledge and
power unfurl outside and below. All the familiar marks of bird citing are in play: Scale is
inescapably skewed, point of view is disoriented, and a local ecology is fetishized. The
birds put the reader on the ground or in an armchair, as naturalist or collector; but that
airliner is cruising at upwards of 30,000 feet, which places the reader in the gaze of the
spy-plane—the moving eye of the Blackbird.
Bird citing involves high stakes, as birds and humans in flight do not go together
easily: planes can crash; carpet-bombing can take place. Yet as ideas, icons, and animals,
birds and humans in flight find themselves linked in many perplexing ways. Bird citing
then becomes utterly quotidian: planes and birds share the sky everyday; and birds are
used as symbols of national identity (recall the Photoshopped image of an eagle with a
tear in its eye after 9/11). These linkages reveal the implications of bird citing, or the
startling proximity of human progress and what we might call a raw state of nature,
where various animals vie for space, perception, and priority. Bird citing emerges as a
series of figurations at the brink of a significant yet impossible separation; bird citing is
no simple matter.
1 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2004), 16. 2 Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” The Palm at the End of
the Mind Ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1991), 166. 3 Photo by Greg Keeler: “Twenty Snowy Mountains, Bridger Range, Montana” (2005).
4 Public image viewed at
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3064/2296987387_3aefb37685.jpg?v=0 (accessed 1
November 2008). 5 Quoted in Martin Greif, The Airport Book (New York: Mayflower Books, 1979), 41.
6 ibid.
7 Photo by the author.
8 Public image from The Observer viewed at
http://www.observer.com/files/imagecache/article/files/Terminal.jpg (accessed 1
November 2008). 9 Images provided by Google Earth and http://www.tsa.gov/.
10 Photo by James Weston Schaberg.
11 Detail of Rara Avis viewed at http://www.handsart.net/raraavis.html (accessed 16 May
2008).
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12
ibid. 13
Photo by author. 14
Paul Ferrell, “Clear-cut for takeoff” Citing wildlife and terrorists, the airport wants to
destroy more native oaks
http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/Content?oid=oid%3A47274 (accessed 24
December 2006). 15
Photo by author. 16
Photo by author. 17
Photo by author. 18
Photo by author. 19
“Flying Gardens” camera-phone shot by Daniel Glass; anonymous 9/11 camera-phone
shot viewed at http://www.apfn.org/apfn/unmasking.htm (accessed 16 May 2008). 20
Paul Ferrell, “‘Clear-cut for takeoff’ Citing wildlife and terrorists, the airport wants to
destroy more native oaks.”
http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/Content?oid=oid%3A47274 (accessed 24
December 2006). 21
Gary Snyder, “No Shadow” Danger on Peaks (Emeryville: Shoemaker & Hoard,
2004), 85. 22
ibid. 23
ibid. 24
Image by Google Earth. 25
Image viewed at Wiki Media “Blackbird”
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird.jpg (1
November 2008). 26
Snyder, 85. 27
Images provided by Google Earth. 28
Retrieved from Google image search at http://images.google.com/images?q=blackbird
(11 October 2008). 29
Hawaiian Airlines advertisement in the 2003 journeys issue of The New Yorker.
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